I recently purchased a used PowerEdge R420 rack server with a Compellent SC220 Storage Shelf. I currently have four 3.5" HDDs in the R420 and ten 2.5" HDDs in the SC220. The R420 server previously had TrueNAS installed, so all of the hard drives on both the R420 and the SC220 are formatted with ZFS. I’m now running Ubuntu on the R420 using ZFS.

The server I’m replacing is an old gaming PC running Manjaro and BTRFS. It has one SSD with the operating system and two 4 TB HDDs set up as RAID0. I’ve been using the RAID to store media downloaded via the Servarr stack.

So, my goal is to create a large pool out of all of the HDDs (except the one running the OS) on the R420 and SC220, and then migrate the media data on the two 4 TB RAID0 drives on my old gaming PC over to R420/SC220 pool. I would then move my Servarr stack over to the R420 as well. Ideally, I’d also like to physically move the two 4 TB HDDs over to the R420. Presumably, I would have to reformat the drives to use ZFS rather the BTRFS and then integrate them somehow into the ZFS pool?

Anyway, I’m not sure of the best procedure to accomplish all of this, so I would be grateful to hear from anyone who has any experience or insight. Thanks in advance.

  • ScottE@lemm.ee
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    10 months ago

    Nope - that’s the whole point of ZFS - you don’t need any special hardware, nor do you want that layer hiding the details since ZFS manages the drives. Plus, you probably want to use RAIDZx with spare drives to absorb failure.